As residents in Lafayette and Iberia Parish pick up after Sunday morning's storms many have been left wondering what kind of storm could have produced that kind of damage.
A National Weather Service team surveyed the area on Monday and determined that the storm was what is known as a "microburst", estimating that winds may have peaked around 95 mph.
The type of damage survey corresponded with the what the radar images looked like at the time of the storm.
So what exactly is a microburst, and how can it cause so much damage?
A microburst is a thunderstorm that is quick collapsing and essentially comes crashing down to Earth.
Thunderstorm life cycles come in three stages: Developing Stage, Mature Stage, Dissipating Stage.
During the developing stage the system is dominated by updrafts, rising air, as the cloud begins to form those massive towers (we see this daily in the summer).
As it approaches the mature stage a downdraft develops sending down water droplets that had been suspended by rising air which causes the rain.
The storm typically has an updraft section (fueling the storm) and a downdraft section (where the rain is falling) during the mature stage.
It then transitions to a dissipating stage which is dominated by downdrafts, cut off from it's energy supply (updrafts) and encountering air cooled by rain the storm starts to fizzle.
A microburst occurs when a strong/severe storm in the mature stage encounters some cooler, stable air and quickly collapses.
Instead of going through the dissipating stage and fizzling out the strong down draft fully takes over and sends all the rain left in the storm down all at once.
When this hits the ground the force is almost like a bomb going off spreading energy out in a radius which can cause winds to reach as high as 150 mph.
This is what occurred on Sunday.
The atmosphere had already been worked through pretty hard on Saturday after a stormy afternoon so there were a lot of pockets of stability.
So when an isolated strong storm hit that stability it collapsed all at once causing the damage many residents woke up to on Sunday.
NWS surveyors estimate that the winds peaked at 95 mph early Sunday which toppled trees, power lines, and even flipped some trailers.
